Delinda's Gardens books and advocacy
  • Home About Delinda
  • Lies That Bind
  • M'TK Sewer Rat: End of an Empire
  • M'TK Sewer Rat: Birth of a Nation
  • Power and Circumstance
  • Something About Maudy
  • Summer Chaos
  • Janette
  • Blog
  • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Advocacy
  • Contact Delinda
  • Enchanted Forest Florals/Calico Gardens
  • Road Trips
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Advocacy

Is it Propaganda? By Delinda McCann

1/26/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
When I was in the fifth grade, the teacher wrote a math problem on the board, 5+4-2= __. He then went around the room and asked each student the answer. All the students in the first row said the answer was five. He started on my row. The first two students answered five. I looked at the problem. I didn’t know how other students got their answer. I thought the answer was seven. I was puzzled but finally decided that if I didn’t tell the teacher what I saw, I’d never learn what the other students had. I hesitated, then said, “I come up with seven.” The teacher didn’t say anything to me as I sat there feeling miserable, and my faced flamed because I never answered wrong. My friend behind me said the answer was five, and the teacher continued around the room. Most students said the answer was five but a few more said seven, making me feel less stupid. 

After the last row of students gave their answers, the teacher told us the correct answer was seven and that he’d coached the first row to say five. I was somewhat relieved that I had known the right answer but still very upset over standing out of the crowd and feeling betrayed by the teacher. My friend behind me was equally upset. “I thought the answer was seven, but everybody else said five, and I didn’t want to look stupid, so I said five.”

The pull to agree with the crowd is huge. In the fifth grade, I had been careful to word my answer so that I could back down when more information became available. My friend went along with the crowd. At the time, I thought the lesson was about not doing what everybody else does—a good lesson. My mom had told me enough times that just because my older cousin did something, that didn’t mean I should. I still did things my older cousin did because she was doing them, and I wanted to play with her.

How many high school students go out drinking on Friday nights because everybody else does? Yeah, they go drinking to have friends, fit in, and be accepted. 

This drive to fit in with the crowd is the power behind what is called the bandwagon approach to propaganda. “Everybody else uses Tide, shouldn’t you be using Tide too?” We hear it all the time. “The nation’s best selling shampoo. The number one product for… More people use… than any other brand.”  Like my fifth grade classmates, people will choose a product based on it’s popularity, thinking perhaps everybody knows something they don’t. Even people who know that a certain shampoo makes their hair fall out and gives them big welts and acne, may question whether or not they should try it again. 

This pull to do the popular thing and follow the crowd is also used to manipulate us in areas other than our use of purchased products. This is where the topic can turn ugly. In the political world, we are bombarded with polls trying to tell us which candidate is the most popular. There is a reason political parties want us to believe more people choose their candidate. This is the reason a party may flood social media with bots and trolls, shouting “more people like our candidate. The other candidate is evil.” Someone like me may look at the bots and trolls and say, but I don’t see what everybody else sees. I’ll go searching for more data. Other people may be like my friend who will go along with the crowd even if what she sees doesn’t look right. 

I find bandwagon propaganda to be abusive. I don’t watch TV because of the manipulative ads. When I look at social media, I see two thirds of the posts support ideas I find morally reprehensible. I  have my own standards of right and wrong, yet I feel distressed that the vast majority of my fellow citizens have no clue. This is the impression I get from social media. I have to look past the sheer volume of posts to the number of different friends who oppose that view to see that most people really do care about loving their neighbor, feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. The propaganda to the contrary is a form a gaslighting, telling me that my truth isn’t real.

How do we related to this type of propaganda? 

All my friends bought a Roomba in the past two years. They love their little robots. Do I go along with the crowd and by one? Actually, I dug deeper. 

Shalah told me hers eliminates dog hair. That’s good. I have a dog that sheds his body volume in hair every day. 

Christina told me hers travels easily from carpet to hardwood and even vacuumed the bathroom rug. Hmm, that sounds good. 

Sara said she picks hers up and moves it to the room she wants cleaned. 

Heather said the cliff sensor really works and her’s has never fallen down stairs. Heather won me over when she said, “My back feels so much better now that I don’t have to vacuum.” I bought my Roomba named Hal. 

What did I do hear other than looking at how many friends had bought the machine. First, these are people I trust to tell me the truth. They had nothing to gain by telling me how much they like their machines. They weren’t making any money off of my purchases. I have reasons to trust them. Next, they talked about concrete specific features that worked for them such as the ability to go over different surfaces, being effective on dog hair, easy to move, and the cliff sensors work. 

Next, I looked at the literature. I read reviews of the different machines on line. I looked for a Consumer Report article. I studied the features to see what I needed and didn’t need. ​

Finally, I checked our budget to see if I had enough cash to buy what I wanted and asked myself if this was really a good use for that money. Because my floors were a mess of dog hair, I’m not young and do have back trouble, and we do have allergies, I thought the robot might be a realistic use of our money. 

The problem with bandwagon propaganda is that sometimes as in the case of my Roomba, everybody is buying the product because it works and solves problems. Other times, we are just being gaslighted with numbers and words that are not tied to solid reasoning. We need to stop and think about what others have to gain by their testimony, Does this mesh with history? What are the concrete measurable facts? What does the literature have to say about this? And finally, we need to step back and ask if something makes sense. Can we see how this will work? Does it make sense?

We need to be wary of all we hear, especially when told everybody else likes this.


0 Comments

Censored Series By Delinda McCAnn

1/21/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture

Please Retweet and share this article because it may not reach all my usual audience due to censorship by one of my writer’s groups.

Being a social scientist, I occasionally like to write about social issues. That is what social scientists do. We’ve studied social movements, social theory, forms of government, counseling techniques and theory, human development, education theory, and the biology of behavior. We use math and statistics to verify our theories. 

I’ve worked in Federal pilot projects, verifying the results of pilot programs. The job of the social scientist is to define what makes society work for everybody and what doesn’t. I can be quite boring in my passionate pursuit of accuracy.
I have to admit that social media, while a fascinating study, often makes me cringe at the concepts or legal terms people misuse. Thus it came about that in my desperate search for new material for my blog, I decided to write a series of articles on the construction and use of propaganda—a topic well within my professional expertise. 

I got censored. Really! I have an online group of authors who review my blog articles. They wouldn’t look at the articles on propaganda because they claimed the articles were too political. Really? I thought I was sticking to general principles and the definition of words. I did use real life examples such as the pairing the word muslim with terrorist. The first article was totally about manipulating the populace by redefining a legal term to mean the opposite of its legal meaning.

The second article was about pairing unrelated words in order to manipulate. The second article was when people informed me that I couldn’t post political articles to the group. That rule isn’t written anywhere. The group states in writing that they don’t accept erotica or pornography, but politics has never been mentioned as off-limits.

The bigger problem here was that a couple educational articles on a topic of vital importance to our community were deemed unacceptable for review because their topic could be interpreted as political. How are we going to have open communication that leads to forming a society that works for everybody if we cannot define the ground rules for that discussion?

When I was in high school, we regularly had a unit on the construction and use of propaganda. I remember an English class where for a month we had to comb through US News & World Report, Time, the local papers, and the NYT to find examples of propaganda and identify the principle that made it manipulative. The next year we had a similar assignment in history class. In history class, We got to examine Patrick Henry’s speeches as appeals to emotion rather than fact. This was high school. Last week, I was trying to write about things that used to be taught in high school. How did a topic that is so basic to decision making and logic come to be defined as too political for a writer’s group to even review?
​

Folks, we’re in trouble. We do need to be able to communicate in a manner that separates fact from opinion. We need to adhere to dictionary meaning of words instead of making them mean whatever suits our goal. We need to recognize that the popular opinion isn’t always right. We need to separate fear and an adrenalin rush from decision making. Propaganda is designed to manipulate by shifting the ground under us. We really need to to be vigilant in setting our decision making on a firm foundation.  Defining that foundation is neither political or bipartisan. It is basic logic as defined by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

0 Comments

Ideas and Propaganda By Delinda McCann

1/15/2019

0 Comments

 
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Some propaganda tricks seem to work over and over and over. The simple linking of two unrelated ideas in one sentence is remarkably effective. I  used this trick in my novel Lucy Goes Home. Lucy and her friends were orphans. The oligarchs in her country saw an opportunity to get free labor by convincing the population to force the orphans in government placement to work for their support. They started a propaganda campaign that linked the word criminal to orphan. Soon, every petty criminal was called an orphan, and every orphan was a criminal.

If some compassionate person pointed out that the orphans had never really commit a crime, the answer was that they were criminals because they lived at the government expense and weren’t working to pay back the money spent on their care, and that is stealing from the taxpayers. The belief became, existing without a family member to support you was somehow dirty and wrong. And, a large portion of the population fell for it. 

I could write the story I did, because I see this happening all around me. Something serious is going on through the linking of unrelated words and ideas.

We see this happening with the verbal linking between Mexican, immigrant and criminal just as I linked orphan and criminal in my book. We’ve heard the words Mexican, criminal, illegal, and immigrant linked so many times that way too many people have come to believe that any brown person coming to our southern border is illegal and a criminal just because they are standing at the border waiting to cross. Not only are people at the border illegal. Spanish speaking children in US schools are labeled illegal without any evidence of improper paperwork. I have a friend who came here from Spain. She introduces herself with, “I’m here from Madrid on a research Visa.” She’s afraid she’ll be mistaken for being of Mexican descent or undocumented because that has come to equal criminal. The words Mexican, illegal, immigrant and criminal are not the only case of destructive paring of words and ideas.

I find the linking of the words Christian with right wing to be particularly offensive. Religion at it’s base is about our spirituality. Some people need to feel connected to other people and to the cosmos in order to be at peace within themselves, to shut out all the unnecessary brain chatter and actually think. This has nothing to do with politics, or power over other people, or controlling others, despite what people of power have tried to practice for ages. All religions are basically about finding that inner peace. The media loves to use the words right wing Christians as they relate stories of horrific spiritual abuse cloaked in bibliobabble. There is nothing Christian about the content of the stories, and there is nothing validly right wing in spiritual assault. The word Christian along with the words right wing have become paired with an ugly vision of mean spirited abusive behavior. How divisive.

How many of us can hear the word Muslim without the word terrorist popping into our minds? I confess, I’ve heard the words Muslim and terrorists linked so many times that I have to mentally erase the word terrorist from my mind. Terrorists are terrorists no matter what color their skin is, or where they come from, or whatever the predominant faith of their culture is. Those who spread propaganda for personal gain and power have done an excellent job of manipulating the population into feeling afraid and trying to withdraw from interactions with others who have some really interesting perspectives, cool food, and exotic experiences.

How dismissive and divisive is the term feminist rhetoric? The problem comes in the word rhetoric-words. Some people can get really triggered by this pairing because the ladies are unjustly demanding special rights. I get pissed and have a knee-jerk reaction that makes me want to backhand the speaker for being dismissive of women for wanting equal pay for equal work, and not wanting to be assaulted or have their intelligence questioned.

One of the reasons the linking of unrelated words works so effectively is those pushing the propaganda can build stories around those words. Stories are very effective in teaching about difficult concepts. When I was working in the field of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, we used stories, hopefully humorous, to describe how specific brain damage links to specific behavior patterns. The syndrome we were talking about had been recognized over twenty years before we started our work, but the general population barely knew the problem existed before people started telling their stories. Telling stories works.

The story can be told two ways. The police pick up two men involved in a knife fight in a parking lot. My local paper might tell the story. At 11 PM Saturday night, two men were arrested behind Sporty’s bar and charged with assault. Alcohol was believed to be involved. 

​Now, the same story can be told pairing words. Carlos Cruz, under investigation for illegal immigration, and another man were arrested behind Sporty’s bar late Saturday evening. Cruz was found in possession of a knife when police arrived on the scene. 

The first telling of this story would rev up the small town gossip machine to full tilt as we wanted to know who was arrested. We would find out that Carlos is as great a guy as we always thought, but he gets belligerent if he drinks. He was, in fact, born on the ferry between here and Seatte, but the police did ask for his address and citizenship status. The attorney, who lost ten bucks betting on the fight, overheard the sheriff asking Carlos about his citizenship and filed complaints with the county. The other man was Chuck Smith. We all wonder what the community could do about Chuck, he’s dangerous. A few woman hope Carlos was able to cut Chuck in the balls. Jokes about Carlos gelding Chuck ensue. Alcohol was involved.

The word pairing telling of the story paints a very different picture, but it does something else. It gives enough facts that we don’t gossip—as much. We know that Cruz was arrested. We might wonder about Cruz’s citizenship, but because we have that name, we don’t overly embarrass his mom with a good, full-blown, small town gossip fest. We don’t get the back story or who else was involved. Also, the AP is not going to pick up a small town arrest. Someone doing internet searches for the propaganda media will pick up the story of the drunken illegal immigrant who attacked someone in a parking lot. They won’t investigate, but the story becomes part of the story-telling around illegal immigration. 

Yes, I know that occasionally an undocumented person does get drunk and get into a knife fight, the problem with how the story is told is that lots of people of all backgrounds get drunk and get into knife fights. The citizenship status is irrelevant to the story because it doesn’t drive the plot or illuminate the character. 

These pairings of words and ideas are so pervasive, we don’t really stop and think about them. I fully admit that despite my allergy to being manipulated and my attempts to be vigilant about thinking things through, these pairings of words do bring up negative images for me, and I will have a knee jerk reaction until I mentally separate the words from each other and from the stories that are told about them. I know, some people miss the oxymoron created around the paring of the words right wing and Christian and will adopt the description, thinking that means they believe in the Bible, but they miss how the right wing pairing diminishes their god to the level of a human being. When a sweet person, who genuinely cares about others, voluntarily identifies with a violent pairing of words, we can see the power of propaganda. These pairings do influence how we think, how we feel, and how we interact, as well as how others perceive us.

​
0 Comments

Words and Propaganda By Delinda McCann

1/8/2019

0 Comments

 

How does propaganda work? How do people get sucked in? We all remember the example of George Bush repeatedly saying Hussein and terrorists together until people came to believe that Hussein, instead of the Saudis, blew up the World Trade Center. This trick works through linking two unrelated things together. 

Right now, I am mostly concerned with a trick based on redefining words. Socialism has been redefined to mean welfare. That is not what it originally meant and those Socialistic societies that failed didn’t fail because of welfare. They failed due to corruption and a prohibition on private ownership of both the means of production and private property.

The word I am most concerned about now is entitlements. The word has been, and still is, a legal term to mean something that has been paid for or a service that comes with its own funding stream. Entitlement money cannot be spent on anything other than what the money was collected for. It seems that the forces behind the propaganda machine would really like to get their hands on entitlement money, so they have redefined the word to mean welfare or free stuff you didn’t earn. The word now leaves a nasty under-taste of a sense of privilege and arrogance.

There is a meme that circulates on social media that shows an older person and their social security check. It reads something like, “Entitlement my ass. I paid for this.” Of course legally, it is an entitlement because this person paid for it. There is nothing wrong with a earned benefit that was part of your salary.  In my case, I’ve been self-employed and paid fifteen percent of my income into my social security. There is nothing wrong with collecting what I paid for, even if the legal term to describe it is entitlement.  

The problem I see is that by redefining the word entitlement to mean a hand-out, the propaganda masters can stir up resentment towards entitlements to the point where they can gain support for laws eliminating entitlements. Naive citizens will rush to the polls to eliminate entitlements while calling me stupid for screaming about them taking away my social security.

Once the laws are changed so that programs with their own funding streams are no longer protected by law, a vast amount of wealth is opened up for exploitation. The funds provided for building maintenance in your school levy can be spent to improve road access to a new development across town. Gas taxes earmarked for road improvements can be spent to build monuments to public figures. Of course money collected for Social Security and Medicare can be spent on congressional salaries. 

Some words can have fluid definitions and some words have many definitions. On the other hand, legal words have specific meanings. Do not let yourself be manipulated into thinking legal definitions don’t matter or that they don’t exist. There are specific reasons the propaganda machine has attacked the word entitlements.  The oligarchs want access to the funds that previous legislators protected from exploitation through a legal definition of the word entitlement.
0 Comments

    Author

    Delinda McCann is a social psychologist, author, avid organic gardener and amateur musician.

    Archives

    November 2021
    October 2021
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012

    Categories

    All
    Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
    Gardening
    Politics
    Social Justice
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly